 Britain's most disgraced citizen may now finally face justice as he sued in the United States for alleged sexual abuse. Virginia Jouffre has filed a lawsuit against Prince Andrew who she accuses of sexually abusing her at the mansion of Jeffrey Epstein as well as other locations when she was under 18. The lawsuit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. This is a quote from the lawsuit as it has been filed. Jouffre was compelled by express or implied threats by Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and or Prince Andrew to engage in sexual acts with Prince Andrew and feared death or physical injury to herself or another and other repercussions for disobeying Epstein, Maxwell and Prince Andrew due to their powerful connections, wealth and authority. It also alleges that Prince Andrew knew that Jouffre was a sex trafficking victim and that she had suffered and continues to suffer significant emotional and psychological distress and harm. In one of the most powerful passages in the claim it states 20 years ago Prince Andrew's wealth power position and connections enabled him to abuse a frightened vulnerable child with no one there to protect her. It is long past the time for him to be held to account. So you probably will know a lot of the background to this story in case you don't. There was a great update, I mean an ABC report. So this is the context, the background to the case. Jouffre now a 38 year old mother living in Australia first accused the Prince of sexual abuse in public court filings in December 2014 in a case brought by alleged Epstein victims against the US Department of Justice. That lawsuit challenged Epstein's lenient deal with federal prosecutors in Florida in 2008. Jouffre alleged in those court submissions that she was directed by Epstein and his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell to have sex with Andrew on three occasions in 2001 in London, New York and the US Virgin Islands. Her claims were met then with vehement denials from Maxwell and from Buckingham Palace on behalf of the Prince, the second son of Britain's queen, Elizabeth the second. Jouffre's attorney, David Boyce, has been speaking about the case. He stated that Prince Andrew has been consistently uncooperative and basically that's what's pushed them to file this lawsuit. So he said, since 2015 we've been trying to have a dialogue with Prince Andrew or his lawyers. We have given him every opportunity to provide any explanation or context that he might have. We've tried to reach a resolution without the necessity of litigation. Prince Andrew and his lawyers have been totally non-responsive. We've discussed a lot how Prince Andrew, it seems, has been incredibly uncooperative in this case, either about allegations that relate directly to him or about allegations that relate to Jouffre Epstein. We know that the American authorities were seeking an interview with Prince Andrew because of their investigation into Epstein and Maxwell, Prince Andrew was unwilling to go. It seems this uncooperative attitude has spanned every aspect of the case. This week, Boyce has spoken to the BBC about his client's motivation for bringing the case. I think what she wants first and foremost is vindication. I think first and foremost she wants to call Prince Andrew to account in court and to allow a jury and a judge to determine the truth of her accusations. I think that she's tried every way she can to resolve this short of litigation. But at this point, a litigation is the only way to establish once and for all what the truth is. Litigation is the only way to establish once and for all what Prince Andrew's evidence actually is. Thus far, he's not been required to come forward and state his defense subject to cross-examination. Litigation will require him to do that. I think secondarily, she's looking to be compensated for the damage that she's done that has been done to her. As you know, she has donated a significant amount of money from the recoveries that she has previously received from Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell to her charitable foundation that is dedicated to trying to help victims of sex trafficking. And I think that she wants to further those goals as well. And finally, I think she wants to send a message to every rich and powerful person who engages in sex trafficking and abuses young girls that this is not acceptable and that you cannot hide behind wealth and power and palace walls. You will be held to account for your actions in a court of law and it will be up to a jury to decide your fate. Some more context to the case. You might be wondering why is this case being brought now, 20 years after the abuse was alleged to have happened. And also, you know, it's been five years since Jeffrey has gone public with this. It was in that deposition when she was filing a lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell. The answer is quite interesting. It's happening now because New York, where this case is filed, introduced a Child Victims Act in 2019, which allowed alleged survivors of under 18 sexual abuse to bring forward cases which were previously time barred. So if there was a case, a case for an alleged abuse, which previously had a statute of limitations, so you had to take a person to court within five, 10 years. However, however long the statute of limitation was for this year only, you can take people to court, even if the alleged abuse happened in the past. Now, the window, so there was a set time period where people would be allowed to take advantage of this act and that ends this week. So this was actually the last chance really for Dufres to take Prince Andrew to court. So she's taken it now because if she'd waited another week even, it could have been impossible. In terms of what could happen next, now the American legal system can seem quite complicated to an outsider, the Telegraph had quite a good rundown actually of the options now facing Prince Andrew. On whether the Duke will take the stand, so whether he will have to give evidence in court, they say it is unlikely. That's not an attractive proposition since a cross-examination of Prince Andrew is unlikely to go well. His performance on Newsnight was one of the great car crash interviews and a grilling by a skilled New York attorney risks a terrifying humiliation. A trip to the U.S. also raises the possibility of the FBI bringing him in for questioning as part of its ongoing investigation into Epstein's crimes. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's former girlfriend and close friend of Prince Andrew goes on trial on sex trafficking, child sex trafficking charges in autumn. So they're saying he will probably be asked to give evidence in court. He's going to be very unlikely to do that because he would be cross-examined by an attorney. It would be like that Newsnight interview all over again, potentially even tougher this time because, well, Emily Maitlis did very well in that interview, she's not an attorney. On whether Prince Andrew could just ignore the claim, so could he just say, oh, this is going on in America or I'm not going to have anything to do with this at all. One possible course of action is to do nothing and ignore any attempts by Mr. Frey's legal team to serve him with legal papers. However, such a strategy risks a civil trial going ahead in his absence and would hugely increase the chances of a judge finding in the claimant's favor. Such a ruling would be catastrophic for the Prince because then a court would be officially labeling him as child sex abuser. So they're saying it is possible for him just to completely ignore this case. They can't extradite him for this because it's civil litigation, it's not criminal litigation, it's not something you can be sent to prison for, it would be suing for damages. He could ignore it, but if he ignores it, that means he's likely to lose it. And then that would mean that an American court has found that he was guilty of sexually abusing a minor. So that's not an outcome that he wants either. Finally, they suggest, and this is a bit of a curveball. They say it could be the case that they could try and switch the trial to the UK. Lawyers with good knowledge of the case suggest that the Prince could try to force the case to be switched to the High Court in London, where they could try to have it struck out on grounds of lack of evidence. If that is unsuccessful, the Prince might also argue that he has some form of sovereign or crown immunity because he was a working member of the Royal Family and a part of the British state apparatus at the time of the alleged incidents. We're not legal experts in terms of especially that latter option of bringing this to the UK Crown Court or the UK High Court. I'm not in a position to tell you how plausible or not that is. What I find particularly shocking about this case, and we've talked about this before actually, is how little pressure has been put on Prince Andrew to cooperate with all of these cases. Whether it's pertaining to allegations which are directly against him or pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and he might have useful information about it, there has been no moral pressure whatsoever, it seems, from this country's establishment, to say, look, if you got involved in these things, we know that your close friend was a convicted child abuser. You've got these allegations against you. What you have to do is you have to face these charges. You have to have your day in court and you, at the very least, have to give an interview to the FBI about Ghislaine Maxwell about Jeffrey Epstein. He's basically used every legal avenue possible to avoid any of this scrutiny and everyone's just let him get away with it. I really do feel like, if you had had Boris Johnson saying, this guy was working at the time for the British monarchy, essentially for the British state, we cannot accept that someone who was working for the British state is shirking their responsibility when it comes to something as serious as child sexual abuse. Instead, they would just say, oh, nothing to do with us. Oh, what an embarrassment. Prince Andrew, what an embarrassing guy. Hopefully, he won't be on the front line of royal politics again. Why aren't we seeing this outcry of people saying, look, whether or not you think Prince Andrew has sexually abused a child, the least he should do is have his day in court. How is he able to avoid that? There's two reasons, Michael. Firstly, a lot of people are essentially implicated, aren't they? It's important to say that Jeffrey Epstein knew Bill Gates. Andrew Neal, Peter Mandelson, Alistair Campbell was in his little black book. I think it'd be very difficult for many of these people, many people at the top of British media and politics, to go all guns blazing because they're implicated, not to the fact that they knew this was happening necessarily or that they were past it. Of course, I'm not saying that, but they were acquaintances or friends with Jeffrey Epstein. There's that dynamic at work, which I think is probably a big one. It can't be understated. Then secondly, and of course, this is the bigger one, is the fact was because Prince Andrew, he's the son of the monarch. He's the son of the Queen of England. Well, I should say that's right. He's the son of the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and its Crown Territories because the Iron Man has nothing to do with Britain. It actually belongs to the Queen like Jersey, etc. There are two areas, Michael, in this country's sort of political discourse in terms of media and journalism. There are two areas which I don't think in any way are dealt with in a remotely democratic, popular, professional way. When I say popular, it's in there sort of, scrutable to ordinary people. The first is foreign policy and defense. We made this huge screw up in Afghanistan 20 years ago. You can't get Tony Blair off the television normally. You won't see him talking about this. Nobody would be doorstepping Tony Blair in Afghanistan like they were with Jeremy Corbyn if he made a cup of tea the wrong way. They were outside his front door every day of the week for literally years. We're not seeing any scrutiny of the same politicians who were responsible for this calamity in Afghanistan. The reason being, foreign defense policy isn't really subject to the kind of media scrutiny you'd expect in democracy. Alongside that is the royal family, the monarchy. It just doesn't happen. We saw that with the Princess Di interview. Martin Beshear, he acted improperly, but the sort of media fallout to that being admitted by the BBC lasted for weeks. The BBC reported on the BBC for weeks because it basically had to self-flagellate very publicly to atone for its sins, which is even daring to hold the monarchy accountable or people inside the monarchy accountable. The royal family and foreign policy and defence policy, on these two things, we don't have a media which asks the right questions, not because they can't, not even because they don't want to. It's just not the done thing. You're not going to get very far in Britain's media and its sort of politics if you ask difficult questions of the Queen, my goodness. So that's why. But I think that's doubly the case because, like I say, so many people, so many people are implicated. Geoffrey Epstein knew so many powerful people and they just want this whole episode over.